Macs, Modularity and More

EclipseCon OSGi server-side tutorial proposal

I’m mooting putting together a tutorial for EclispeCon 2007 on server-side OSGi programs, or other command-line programs using the OSGi framework. It won’t cover HTTP, or either embedding OSGi into a HTTP/Servlet engine (or vice versa), but rather look more generally about the ways in which OSGi servers can be put together.

It would cover services, configuration, thread management, starting/stopping, logging and probably some kind of socket communication (e.g. implementing an SMTP server). It would also cover the use of extensions or services to dynamically bring in functionality e.g. new spam blocking rules and filters on a running system, possibly including update managers.

Whilst I might talk about an HTTP server instead, I don’t really want to focus on the specifics of the server’s protocol, but on the wider server-side aspects; plus, I don’t want to get into either the HTTP service or embedding issues with tomcat etc. which would no doubt follow on from such an HTTP-oriented presentation.

If anyone has any opinions about whether they’d be interested in this, or any suggestions of what else would be good to cover in a server-oriented session, please let me know by replying to this blog entry, or this post on the Equinox newsgroup (or failing that, mail me at gmail.com with alex.blewitt). If no-one’s interested, I probably won’t bother submitting this idea.

PS Having just migrated my blog to beta.blogger.com, I’m having a few teething problems; so if you see a whole raft of my blog entries being updated, I’ve not been that productive – it’s just that the new and improved blogger has once again decided to reset all the update times on my blog entries back to the beginning again and thus they’re showing up as new. Apologies.